Editor’s note: This commentary is by Jules Rabin, who came to Vermont in 1968 to teach at Goddard College and 10 years later shifted to baking bread in a wood-fired oven. He lives in Plainfield.
[T]here is a new field in mathematics, fractals, that studies the strange fact of nature that some natural forms like cauliflower and shorelines repeat their gross structures in their smaller parts: cauliflower heads, for example, repeat their forms in their little florets and those florets in yet littler ones; and coastal inlets the size of bays comprising smaller and ever smaller inlets, down to finger-size bites of mud, so that it becomes hard to measure the “true” length of a fabulously indented coast like Maine’s: 230 miles? 3,450 miles? 500,000 miles?
That field of study, fractals, was so named by one of its originators, a great mathematician with the quaint and euphonious name Mandelbrot, or “almond bread.”
The idea of “fractals,” as in our fine American version of it, a chip off the old block, has come to me as I keep on reflecting on a puzzle that I haven’t been able to let go of, the puzzle of the man, Stephen Paddock, who inflicted those 58 random deaths and more than 500 random injuries, on a crowd of thousands of concert-goers under the open sky of Las Vegas. He, the owner of 42 serious guns, of which 23 were ready to hand when he launched his one-man killing spree from the windows of his luxury suite on the 32nd floor of one of his favorite gambling houses overlooking that open-air concert.
With Stephen Paddock’s personal arsenal of 42 guns in mind (19 of them in safe-keeping at his home 80 miles away), consider this one more glaring fact: that the inconceivably large war and defense budget of $610 billion for the U.S. in 2016, Paddock’s country and ours, exceeds the combined budgets of the next eight most heavily armed countries of the world: China, Russia, England, France, Germany, etc.
While, stupefyingly, President Donald Trump is currently advocating an increase for next year of almost 10 percent ($55 billion) in our present humungous arsenal and its associated parts, while cries of “Help!” coming from our decaying roads and bridges around the country and our antiquated railroad system go unanswered. And our staggering health care system, likewise.
Fractals, if they are the case here — Stephen Paddock as a “fractal” mirroring our country — don’t figure in our daily conversations. But we do have handy fine old sayings like “The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree,” and “Like father, like son” (the “father” in this case being “the Fatherland”).
They carry the case, too.
It’s an eerie and very troubling fact that while Stephen Paddock single-handedly shot and killed to an extreme — those counts of 58 dead and more than 500 wounded are unexampled in the annals of recent “mass shootings” in the U.S. — he is one of many, many mass shooters represented in the statistics of that offense. From Jan. 1 to Oct. 2, the nine months before the day that Paddock went on his rampage, there were over 270 mass shootings in America, or an average, incredible as it may be, of one a day (taking the official definition of “mass shooting” as an event when four or more persons were shot and/or killed in a single event). With 5 percent of the world’s population, the U.S. between 1966 and 2012 accounted for 31 percent of mass shootings worldwide … six times the world average.
But taking the case of Stephen Paddock specifically — why he? Can we reach his interior reasons for killing and wounding those hundreds upon hundreds of strangers, known to himself or not? The theory of fractals that I’ve brought up here only generalizes … it doesn’t account for the individual case. Given our otherwise impoverished nation’s steady achievement in overarming to tooth-aching levels, and its parallel in Stephen Paddock’s great private arsenal, I think the new theory of “fractals” needs to be consulted and considered … as well as old sayings like “He’s a chip off the old block” and “Like father, like son.”
I also have a hunch that, with regard to this very particular son of the U.S.A., Stephen Paddock, a “loner” who cultivated guns and guns-upon-guns, that old Dr. Freud should be consulted, too. Our national intoxication with the gun brings to mind — to my mind — Charlton Heston’s unforgettable warning that to take his gun away from him, the vile stranger would have to pry it from his cold dead hands.
Imagine that.
I think our American preoccupation with the gun goes very deep, and we’re in for a continuation of mass shootings in our fair land. Actual mass shooters are a very small fraction of actual gun owners. But strange guys like Stephen Paddock are there, among the crowd — sufficient in number to provide vast America with that one mass shooting a day that we’ve fallen heir to.
And speaking again of fractals … given that a large fraction of our historic mass shooters were loners, including, pathetically, Stephen Paddock, it’s interesting that President Trump has set the U.S. on a track of disdain for and separation from major world organizations like the U.N., UNESCO, the Paris climate accord, and on to such unlovelies, even, as NAFTA and TPP.
Big guns and few friendships or accords are to be our country’s reigning doctrine.
Just take a count of the world leaders Donald Trump has insulted or affronted in the first 10 months of his presidency. And the high officials he’s brought into his White House, only to part company with them shortly after.
